He Spent a Year Paying a Doctor to Write Down a Fragile, Unstable Version of Me That Didn’t Exist — So When He Finally Set Me Aside, the Whole World Would Believe I’d Simply Come Apart on My Own

It is worth understanding why he could not help himself, because it is the same flaw that undoes every man who rules by narrative.

Christian had spent his entire adult life learning that any problem could be solved by telling the right story to enough people — that reality was not a fixed thing but a market, and that with sufficient charm and production values you could sell the public whatever version of events served you.

It had always worked.

It had made him a star out of a hidden man with a secret family; it had made a manufactured romance look like destiny; it had very nearly made a sound woman look like an invalid.

So when the truth began to surface, his instinct was not to reckon with it — the concept of a truth that could not be managed was, I think, genuinely foreign to him — but to do the thing that had always worked before, which was to produce a better story.